Subj : Re: Is a PC optical drive a "player"?
To   : slacker
From : Nightfox
Date : Thu Apr 24 2025 09:20 am

  Re: Re: Is a PC optical drive a "player"?
  By: slacker to Nightfox on Thu Apr 24 2025 07:50 am

 sl> In a tangentially related "old man yells at cloud" issue:

 sl> KB vs KiB, etc

 sl> For a good portion of my life I remember KB=1024 bytes. The past 10 years
 sl> or so, its now KB bytes and a KiB is 1024 bytes.

 sl> I've come to terms with the change but I don't really like it.

 sl> At work, the legacy system I work on refers to storage in base 2 so a
 sl> KB=1024 but interacts with newer services that are base 10 where KB=1000
 sl> so there's a headache of conversions.

 sl> Anyway, I don't really understand why that all changed. I've heard people
 sl> mention HDD storage manufacturers using base 10 as marketing and it stuck
 sl> but that seems like an odd reason to upend everything.

That bugs me too.  I remember the same, where KB was 1024 bytes, and so on.  I've heard that about HDD manufacturers doing that as a marketing term.  But I've also heard some people say Microsoft and IBM started it with KB being 1024 bytes & such, and that they were wrong all along.  I don't know what's correct now.

One thing I've noticed is that Windows still uses the base 2 sizes for that, but Mac OS uses base 10.  So if you look at a file's size on Windows, and the same file on a Mac, Mac OS will make it seem like the file is a bit bigger because it uses base 10 to report its file size (unless you look at the number of bytes, rather than megabytes/gigabytes/etc.).

Nightfox
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